Friday, August 17, 2012

Failed to synchronize subtitles...

Thanks to comments from users, we've found a bug in the synchronization page that prevented users from synchronizing subtitles when using Internet Explorer. This caused a lot of frustration for our Internet Explorer users, and we're very sorry for this.

The bug has been fixed, and Internet Explorer users can continue using http://yt-subs.appspot.com as expected.

Based on Google Analytics, around 12% of the people who add subtitles on the site, use Internet Explorer. That's not a low number, but at least it's lower than the average usage of Internet Explorer on the internet. Here are the statistics from Google Analytics:



The rest of the post contains somewhat technical information on what was the bug.

The bug was actually quite simple: During development, we use JavaScript's console to trace / debug issues. Sadly, Internet Explorer doesn't support this, and before publishing a new version to the site, we have to make sure we remove calls on the console object, and we forgot one such call that caused a JavaScript error in the save flow of the Synchronization page.

We have some tests that use WebDriver to run end-to-end tests, but we didn't yet find a way to run these tests on Internet Explorer. Hmm, guess that's next on our plate.

1 comment:

  1. An easy solution would be to let anyone submit a subtitle to any video to the YouTube uploader... then that person gets an alert, and can choose to use that subtitle track or not (accept or reject it).
    Total Video Downloader

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